Thursday was going to be one of the first good days weather-wise and we needed a change of pace. We decided to take the kids to Cape Canaveral space center. The weather was warm for the first time, although it was still very windy. During our tour we saw a rocket on the launch pad. Our tour guide told us a launch was scheduled for February 15th. The rocket was going to launch Themis, a research project containing 5 different satellites. Its purpose was to study energy releases from the Earth’s magnetosphere. She told us that we could call our Senator and try to get VIP tickets to view the launching from Cape Canaveral. We would love to see a launch but thought surely we would be gone by then.

We drove back to Palm Coast that evening in a torrential downpour and the weather deteriorated. Our area was under a tornado warning until 1 am. On TV we could see the line of severe storms heading right toward us. Being from Illinois originally, when a tornado is coming your way, you head for the basement. On a catamaran there is no basement, (and believe me if there was one it would be full of stuff), so we decided to take the kids into the marina showers.

It wasn’t too hard waking up Tristan and getting him into a raincoat, but Tessa was another story. When we started getting them ready the wind was really blowing and then it started to lessen. This is usually the calm before the tornado. Getting no cooperation from Tessa, (it was like trying to put a cat in bathwater!), I finally wrapped a blanket around her, grabbed her and went out into the cockpit. Now we had to negotiate getting off the boat at low tide, with the rain and the lightning. At this point we realized that this could be more dangerous than simply staying on the boat, but we forged ahead. We made it to the showers where we stayed for about 30 minutes, long enough that the worse should have passed over us.

When we got back on the boat, we heard on the news that the tornado watch was extended for another hour. We were done though. The kids went back to bed and we stayed up until about 3 am until things settled down. That morning when we saw on the news all the damage in the towns around us, we considered ourselves very lucky.